| The Atomic Agora Life and Death in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Snow fell on the city for only one day in early March this year. It covered everything in the early morning hours, before the sun was up. The white powdery crystals coated the streets with less than an inch as the temperature dropped. By noon it had all melted away. In just one month the afternoon heat would push 90 degrees, and it would just keep getting hotter. There is a drought; not enough rainfall. The river is running dry. Two fighter jets scream by overhead toward the southeast. Those who have jobs are on their way to work, while others sleep in and still more scavenge. The factories come to life, the laboratories begin to buzz with activity, the city streets flow with automobiles like blood cells. This is Albuquerque.
Albuquerque’s story can be told along the axis of Central Avenue, the old Route 66. The city was born on the eastern edge of the Bosque, the lush cottonwood forest and meadows that flank the Rio Grande River. When the rail lines came through in late 19 th century the city center moved several miles further to the East along the tracks where modern day Albuquerque’s downtown is situated. But it wasn’t until the automobile and the rise of car culture that Albuquerque would really come into its own. Cross-continental travel by automobile made Albuquerque more than just an outpost in the desert Southwest, indeed, many a traveler who intended to pass through stopped and never left. The Route 66 came to symbolize the city with countless hotels, diners, and businesses springing up along it. It gave Albuquerque, and America, a kind of appreciable car culture and aesthetics of the road. This Albuquerque, although it was centered on the automobile like the modern day incarnation was different in its approach to the road and its relationship with the car. This was the Albuquerque of roadside diners, small theaters, motor-hotels, drive-thrus, and it all thrived off of the 66.
The end of this era came with the completion of the Interstate 40 freeway which bypassed the neon lit lanes of the Route 66, replacing the fabled drag through the heart of Albuquerque with a multi-lane freeway to the north capable of speeding travelers through the city in mere minutes. Ironically, car culture had put the pedal to the metal and left Albuquerque in the dust. Countless American cities have lived this same history, their downtowns flourishing as the central strip of the old highway until the bypasses came. Then the town’s prosperity waned and came the intensification of auto-centric planning as businesses and residences sprang up around the off ramps, turnpikes, and suburban spurs. Today the Route 66 exist as a mere caricature of its old self around the Downtown and the University districts. The resonance of this lost era is captured in the recreated Route 66 in Downtown Albuquerque, now a trendy pocket of nightclubs, multiplexes, and restaurants like the “Route 66 Diner.” Elsewhere, on the Mesa in western Albuquerque, and through the lonesome smoggy stretch from Nob Hill to the Eastern edge of the city, the old Route 66 is a long wilted vine. Many of the hotels remain boarded up, or they have been converted to apartments rented by some of the city’s most impoverished residents. Some of the storefronts are shuttered year round and a general atmosphere of dismay and decay reigns along the side streets.
Off of Central Avenue, especially in the Northeastern Heights of the city, a era or booming growth was on its way during the post World War Two period. Albuquerque spread far and wide to encompass much of the slopping plane from the base of the Sandia Mountains, to the banks of the Rio Grande and beyond. The city embraced a suburban mantra and established itself as a would be metropolis for the Southwest. This was a new beginning, but it was also the beginning of an end.
The end of Albuquerque as a city with a bright present and a hopeful future came not with the car and suburbanization. Car culture and sprawl was a mixed blessing replete with untamed expansion, smog and traffic, pedestrian terror, the demolition of architectural history, and the backwards planning of civil engineers bent on building a better freeway out of a city street. But even with all of this, Albuquerque, like most American cities would have remained a beautiful contradiction. No, it wasn’t the Los Angeles syndrome that drove Albuquerque down a dark highway, it was an altogether more sinister technological development that put the rope around Albuquerque’s neck and began to violently kick the stool of New Mexico on which the city stands. This is the story of the atomic bomb.
Nuclear New Mexico Long before the War on Terror, the Cold War, before World Wars II and I, all the way back to the 18 th century before the United States existed, Central and Northern New Mexico was home to various Native American Tribes whose communities and pueblos constituted some of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in North America. European imperial conquest of the continent put the peoples and lands of New Mexico under Spanish subjugation. The city of Albuquerque, founded in 1706 by Governor Francisco Cuervo Valdez helped to incorporate New Mexico as a colony of Spanish possession.
From these beginnings to its place in the military-industrial empire of modern America, Albuquerque’s early history is memorialized on several engravings in the Old Town Plaza. Old Town is the reified and re-creational locus of the city’s cultural center. It is also by far the most popular destination of tourists who come for the restaurants and upscale boutiques that line the square. The shops sell everything from fine Navajo turquoise and silver jewelry to gaudy souvenirs and clothing.
Four bronze plaques set into the earth in the plaza communicate the official history and identity of Albuquerque to the thousands of visitors and tourist who pass through on the weekends. The first plaque commemorating the establishment of Albuquerque proclaims that; “30 families from Bernalillo accompanied by soldiers to protect them from nomadic Indians…” settled the site by the Rio Grande. The soldiers were necessary because according to the engravings, “in Spanish days the town was often raided by hostile Indians.”
The next plaque describes the second conquest of New Mexico by the burgeoning American imperial push of manifest destiny. It reads; “In 1846 the stars and stripes were raised over the plaza by US troops under General Stephan W. Kearny…” and within very little time, Albuquerque, now under US rule became among other things, “a supply center for military posts,” throughout the Southwest. Albuquerque became an essential staging point for the U.S. government’s wars against the Navajo and other Native American tribes resistant to white settlement and encroachment in and around their nations.
The city remained relatively isolated for the next one hundred years serving little purpose in national and international politics and economy. Then came the bomb. The Manhattan Project brought radical change to New Mexico when the secret weapons project in the north of the state started what would become the very economic and political basis upon which modern New Mexico is built. In no time Albuquerque became home to the industrial firms, banks, research outfits, and Anglo-immigrant workforce that supported and coalesced the conceptual designs coming out of Los Alamos, where General Groves’ and Oppenhiemer’s team had worked furiously to make the atom bomb a reality. Albuquerque also became the permanent home of Sandia National Laboratories, now a Lockheed Martin operated DOE nuclear weapons facility that equals if not surpasses Los Alamos Laboratory in its budget, size, and influence within the U.S. military-industrial-complex. It was with this economic dependence and geopolitical clout embodied in the nuclear weapons industry of Albuquerque that urban landscape, popular art, and redevelopments such as the city’s Old Town culture center, history and science museums, parks, and atomic kitsch took on a larger and more pronounced role in the lives of New Mexicans and Americans in general. Particular to the culture of Albuquerque was its relation to the means and ends of mass destruction. Albuquerque is a city built upon the continuity of colonization and war, mass destruction and the architecture of genocide, from the Spanish to the United States, from the wars against the first peoples of the Americas to the present, with the atomic weapon symbolizing the peak of this project.
The economy of New Mexico resides, sluggish and forlorn, chained to its cellmate, the nuclear weapons establishment. The main sources of investment in the State come not from enterprising individuals or businesses within New Mexico, but from the bureaucratic coffers of the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington D.C., from secretive investment funds like the C.I.A.’s InQTel, the bulging wallets of various Department of Defense Agencies, or from large multinational corporations like Intel, Wal-Mart, and Northrop Grumman. Nearly every major corporation operating in the state has its headquarters and main operations elsewhere. Much of Albuquerque’s prime real estate is even the possession of out of state investors. Thus one wonders if the state’s colonial status ever wore off?
Local journalist and poet V.B. Price describes the coming of the nuclear-military-industrial complex after World War II as a boom period similar the city’s founding history as a colonial military outpost of sorts, but on a wholly different scale:
“… Albuquerque began to feel the force of another turning point in the history of its cityscape when in 1945 the military-industrial complex established itself in earnest at Sandia Base, in the far Southeast-Heights near the Manzano Mountians. It had been almost one hundred years since the U.S. military caused American Albuquerque’s first period of booming growth in 1846. The new military presence had the same effect, but the scale was vastly different. No longer a frontier outpost, though still a Shangri-la, Albuquerque became the capital of America’s nuclear war machine, the dominant site of weapons research, management, and testing.”
Today, nuclear weapons research, design, and production activities paid for by the Department of Energy in New Mexico accounts for more than $4 billion annually. Tens of thousands of the state’s workers (out of a total of 800,000) are directly employed at the nuclear weapons labs, and many more find their employment in the corporations and subcontractors that supply the labs with materials and services. These are some the best paying and most prestigious positions in the state’s economy. It is not an exaggeration to say that nuclear weaponry is at the core of New Mexico’s political-economy.
The Atomic Agora Does the nature of a state’s economy have an impact on the culture and well being of its citizenry? Are there ecological and sociological consequences to New Mexico’s dependence on the atomic bomb? Of course there are, and they are evident in the everyday lives of Albuquerque’s residents. The atomic agora is a phrase I have coined to describe this relationship. The atomic agora is the cityscape and culture inhabited by E.L. Doctorow’s “people of the bomb.” The atomic agora is an essence of a militarized Americana. The atomic agora is a place of unnerving dedication to warfare, and its social and political landscape is most clearly characterized by a commitment to the ever increasing militarization of life. One need only venture out into the public space of Albuquerque to understand this. But one can find proof of it anywhere in the United States. The consequences of the militarized state, often thought about in relation to the U.S. as a whole, but found in its most pure and distilled form in Albuquerque, New Mexico are visible in the streets, on the corner, in the shopping malls, the schools, the parks, barrios, and back alleys of Albuquerque.
Albuquerque’s Civic Nucleus
Every city has a cultural center. Often it is found in the civic plazas and squares that fill the core of a city’s landscape. Cultural centers contain the key institutions of civic life and social relationship; the city hall, public library, public parks and plazas. They are also the sites of a municipality’s institutions of history and self-identity. These are the museums and landmarks that set the city apart from all others.
Museums help to define a city’s identity by presenting its official history to both tourists and locals. For tourists the presentation is more postmodern. It is re-creational, it often mimics and reinterprets the past, and it is usually served up as entertainment. For the citizen a trip to the cultural center is more often a civilizing activity. Institutions that communicate identity for the citizen are educational, subtle, even challenging. Cultural centers help us understand a locale and its people. What specific aspects of a region’s history and culture merits a museum, what goes into it, and how it is presented are important components of how a city builds its identity and communicates its legacy and importance to the world. The symbolic content and the physical character of a city’s cultural core is extremely important.
Truly cosmopolitan metropoleis like New York, or Paris are likely to display in their museums the artifacts and histories of global culture just as often as they showcase their particular local history and art. This is part of their cosmopolitan civic identity. But all cities, even the cosmopolitan, build and sustain museums and institutions of their singular past, institutions that are specific to their local culture and their contributions to the world. San Francisco has its cable car museum; Morgan City, Louisiana has the Oil Rig Museum; Detroit is home to the Motown Museum; San Jose, California has recently cemented its history as the home of hi-technology with the Tech Museum of Innovation; part of Boston’s identity as home to the American Revolution is communicated in its Tea Party and Ship Museum.
For Albuquerque, New Mexico one of its core institutions of identity and history is the National Atomic Museum. Located in the cultural heart of the city, the Atomic Museum advertises itself as a showcase for all things from the nuclear age. But the main focus of the museum’s exhibit is the nuclear weapon. The Atomic Museum is located adjacent to the large modern New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, and the Explora! Science Center, a children’s museum of interactive learning. Across the street from the Atomic Museum is the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. And all of this cultural cache is planted in the midst of the city’s Old Town district, itself a heavily endowed place of history and cultural meaning.
The National Atomic Museum is scheduled to move to a new location soon. The museum was originally sited on Kirtland Air Force Base in the southeast of the city. At Kirtland, the museums displays were much larger, and the intimate connection between atomic energy and the military were evident. The relocation of the museum to the cultural core of Albuquerque, while an apt place for the institution in the city its display’s contents helped to build, is merely the interim home. The museum’s future site will nearly double the current location’s size, and museum leaders hint that when relocated the museum will expand its displays to include a more general scientific theme with exhibits in nuclear medicine, radiation, one exhibit celebrating 100 years of aviation, and a special homage to female scientists.
Standing 70 feet tall on the corner of the street just outside of the National Atomic Museum is a Redstone Missile. Its nosecone points skyward poised as though it were ready to launch on a moments notice. In its shadow families gather and children play across the street at Tiguex Park, as others pass under it on their way toward the Albuquerque Science Center, the Explora!, the Museum of Art and History, or the Atomic Museum itself. No matter how you spin it, rampant militarism or patriotic pride, the missile is symbolic of Albuquerque – its payload built the city. It is a reminder of the two thousand nuclear weapons stored beneath the ground at Kirtland Air Force Base, just several miles beyond city limits. It is a reminder of the secretive DOE weapons labs at Sandia, and Los Alamos to the North. It is a symbol of the military industrial complex and the massive technological machinery that thrives off Pentagon spending in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Designed by the Army in 1950 the Redstone was a surface-to-surface missile capable of hitting targets 200 miles away. The rocket was designed to carry both conventional munitions as well as atomic weapons and was deployed as part of the United States nuclear arsenal, carrying warheads of 325 kilotons (21 times larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) or 3.8 megatons (172 times larger than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki). The Redstone Rocket is a cold war artifact without equal. In addition to the missile’s place in the nuclear arsenal, a modified Redstone Rocket called a Jupiter-C Missile RS-29 was responsible for the launch of the first US satellite on January 31, 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik making it a Cold War artifact par excellence. Only six months later the military would fire a Redstone over 200,000 feet into the atmosphere where they would detonate a nuclear weapon of one megaton.
Interestingly, the Redstone Missile is a direct descendent of Nazi Germany’s V-2 Rocket. During World War II the Nazis accelerated their rocket program believing that weapons like the V-2 would prove superior in the race for air power in Europe. The main effort of this German program was spearheaded by Nazi scientist Werner Von Braun who led a team of hundreds of German technicians and thousands of slave laborers in the Dora facility near Nordhausen, Germany.
Ultimately the United States ended up importing the better part of the Nazi rocket program, including its key personnel, many of whom ended up at the Army’s Huntsville Alabama facility known as Redstone Arsenal. It was in Huntsville where Von Braun and his new American patrons created the missile of the same name, all based on the V-2 Rocket. Other ex-German scientists came to work in New Mexico at the White Sands Missile Range. Back in Los Alamos they would perfect the nuclear payloads for it and later more advanced missiles to carry. Albuquerque’s Redstone Missile, planted strategically like a chess piece in the city’s symbolic cultural landscape, is visible in the everyday lives the families that frequent Tiguex Park, the tourist and schoolchildren that visit the museums and art exhibits, and thousands more who can see the tip of the Rocket from a distance of several hundred yards over the stucco roofs and shade trees of old town.
At the foot of the missile, inside of the National Atomic Museum, school children, tourists, and weekend visitors take in a virtual PR message from Kirtland Air Force Base, the nuclear weapons complex, and the nuclear energy industry. One gets the feeling after walking through numerous exhibits proclaiming radiation to be “perfectly harmless”, “normal”, and even wonderful, that atomic energy is and always has been the solution to all our problems. The museum mixes nuclear power and nuclear weaponry in an almost seamless manner. Nuclear power and the history of atomic science meld from the early ignorance of the true properties of the atom to the current and confidently full understanding of the atom that we purportedly now possess. Toward the back of the museum several model nuclear weapons on display stand as a testament to the final purpose toward which nuclear science has been put.
If the Redstone Rocket standing outside harkens back to the primitive days of nuclear war, the Trident I C4 submarine launched ballistic missile, a disassembled example of which they display inside the National Atomic Museum, with eight independently targetable warheads of 100 kilotons each, is surely a reassuring sign of humanity’s progress in its ability to fully annihilate all life in mere minutes. In the museum’s gift shop visitors can purchase military insignia from the Manhattan Project’s days up to the present. There are numerous videos and books, dozens of posters for sale, or they can buy any number of atomic kitsch and trinkets to take home.
A Day in the Mall The mall has become to the American citizen-shopper what the agora was to the ancient Greeks. In contemporary America the indoor mall has gained primacy as the hub of commerce and retail; the comfortable location where the mass consumption of clothing, food, culture and identity takes place across the nation on any given day. The mall is the modern marketplace.
But the mall is more of a modern day agora for Americans than its role as the “marketplace” would imply. The mall has become the modern day agora because it exists as the dominant, if not singular place of large-scale social interaction for many people. To the ancient Greeks the agora was much more than a mere “market”, it was a place of gathering in the broadest sense. Consequentially, the modern mall is now one of the sole places where many Americans go to be among others, to walk in the crowds and brush against strangers, and, especially for youths, it is a place of socialization and public exhibition. The mall, a private space for all intentions and purposes, has replaced what was formerly public space and become the central institution that brings citizens into close contact with one another.
In combination with car culture, the rise of the mall in American society has destroyed many a city’s real public spaces and supplanted them with massive indoor air conditioned promenades made indistinguishable from one another by their existence as non-places. In addition to their ethereal imprints in the social landscape, and because of their status as the private property of retail corporations, malls have done much to de-politicize public life in the United States. Malls, in synergy with car culture, and suburbanization have replaced many of the central public spaces in America with areas owned and controlled by private consortiums whose sole concern is to attract and foster consumerism amongst the masses. Life as an American can now be lived without ever passing through truly public space. The citizen can relax in the comfort of her private home, she can get into her car, a de facto place of privacy on the road, and she can drive to the mall, where once she exits her car she finds herself on the securely private pavement of the center’s parking lot – and so it goes.
Columbia University Professor Kenneth Jackson describes malls as mausoleums of merchandizing, perhaps not to portray their atmosphere, which is usually bright and purposefully energetic, but instead to make note of what malls have helped to put to death; rich, inherently political, and free areas of socialization that once filled the landscape of life outside of one’s home and place of work.
Albuquerque ’s largest mall, the Coronado Center, is a textbook example of these non-places that have done so much to de-politicize the American landscape. The Coronado Center is owned by General Growth Properties, a retail conglomerate owning 172 malls and shopping centers in 41 states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Coronado mall is a small piece (1.51 million square feet and 5606 parking spaces) in General Growth’s empire of more than 149 million square feet of dense indoor public space in every major metropolitan area in the nation. Coronado Center is best described as the perfect model of a General Growth Properties mall. According to General Growth;
“Shopping is the #1 activity of tourists in America, and General Growth Properties offers America's Favorite Shopping Destinations where locals can shop with friends and families.
Above the Coronado Mall’s entrances is written, “The Center of the Great Southwest,” and save for a mall or two in Phoenix or Las Vegas this claim may very well pan out to be true. Judging from the overflowing parking lots and an average day’s business, the Coronado pulls more people into one common area than any other institution in New Mexico.
As Albuquerque’s, if not the “Southwest’s center”, the Coronado malls occupies a position of enormous power in the communication of culture and politics. On any given day thousands of people pass through the Coronado’s interior, while many more make their ways into the bookshops, and department stores that ring the sprawling edifice’s exterior. In comparison to other would be centers of public space and socialization, the Coronado mall far surpasses any other, considering the sheer numbers of people who fill its walkways at any given time. It presents a sharp contrast with downtown Albuquerque which is now solely a place for business by day, and a ghost town by night, giving it a busy feel on weekdays but never a space with real social significance.
Mirroring any mega mall-town America, the Coronado is typified by its anti-social environment which having pushed consumerism far to the front, has simultaneously banished spontaneity, creativity, and politics to the no man’s land of city streets and snarling traffic devoid of any pedestrian activity.
But the Coronado Center has not extinguished all political activity from its crowded space. The politics of empire and nuclear-militarism (complementary to the politics of reckless consumerism?) can be seen within the Coronado on many occasions. This selected politics, a kind of anti-politics, is shared by all privatized public spaces regardless of their position or advocacy. For Albuquerque, the heart of the nuclear-military-industrial complex, political display in the mall takes on a well defined militarized form.
Examples of this anti-politics and militarized public space are in abundance within the Coronado Center. For instance, while the mall officially shuns individual political advocacy or social interaction among its patrons, it supports whole-heartedly the carefully planned patriotic events and public relations spectacles of military planners, and militarist politicians. For New Mexico, the image of militarism must be kept shiny and hopeful, lest the state’s two million people begin to see the institutions of war and the weapons industry as a dead weight rather than an anchor of economic stability.
Therefore what goes on inside the mall is of extreme importance because it is the central public space in Albuquerque. Legitimacy and monopoly within this space is a necessity because the mall is nothing less than the indispensable forum for face-to-face communication, and political advocacy. The shows and events that the militarists put on in the mall are nothing short of extravaganzas for the people, recruitment for the young men and women, entertainment for the families, vote-getters for the politicians, opportunities for the businesses, and of course, fun for the kids.
For the young men and women who find themselves drawn from the stores and food courts, there are the military recruiters mulling around the mall’s isles and near their tables filled with glossy brochures, free calendars, pens, and other gimmicks all sporting Air Force logos, or Army bravado. They hand out DVDs and promotional CDs entitled “Fuel Your Future: Air National Guard”, and “The Guard Experience: Freedom Isn’t Free”, to anyone who approached them with the least bit of curiosity. They trump the Army’s smash hit online videogame called “ America’s Army”. They promise students money for college and valuable technical training. The recruiters hand out lists of 54 reasons to join the Guard, “#18. Make your friends jealous because you drive a HUMVEE at work,” and “#22. Qualify with a real M16 instead of playing with one on a video game.” In addition to these reasons the recruiters and their literature proclaim you will be carrying on the proud history of America:
“The Army National Guard began on December 13, 1636 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony organized three militia regiments to defend against the growing threat of the Pequot Indians. Today, the Army National Guard continues its historic mission of providing defense for the nation.”
For the families the militarists put on an event that is half charity, half carnival. Girl Scouts scour the mall asking; “would you like to buy a box of cookies for the troops?” Women sit behind a table, adjacent to the military’s recruitment tables, in the center of the mall selling boxes of Girl Scout cookies to send to troops overseas. “Treats for Troops” the event is called, and for three dollars the girl scouts will sell a box and let the buyer attach a message for the soldiers. Several UPS employees at an adjacent table promise to ship if for free, because as several jubilant brown shirted employees will eagerly explain, it is part of the corporation’s patriotic duty and family values to support the troops. While mom and dad buy a box of cookies, the children run franticly and giggle watching a 10 foot tall cartoonish looking inflatable US Soldier chase other children, shake hands, give hugs, and make a million friends through humor.
Outside of a main entrance the military has erected a 35 foot tall column, a fiberglass tower of fake rock with bolted on hand holds. Families gather around it to watch their sons and daughters get suited up with climbing harnesses by uniformed national guardsmen, given brief instructions, and then have at it. The children climb to the rock’s peak, atop which is planted a United States Flag, and there they ring a bell and repel back down. The soldiers say they are confidence building, the children say its fun, and the family thanks the military for the wonderful day’s wholesome adventure at the Coronado Center in Albuquerque.
Local congresswoman Heather Wilson of Albuquerque, perhaps the most ardent supporter of new nuclear weapons and mushrooming budgets for the bomb labs is also a big booster of the “Treats for Troops” event. In her own words the event is not an opportunity for promoting the politics of empire and militarism in New Mexico. Rather, it is about instilling an ethic of service and community in the young. Wilson describes the event in one of her online postcards to here Albuquerque constituents;
“As Scouts packed the cookies surrounded by men and women in uniform, reading the prayers and words of support, they learned a little about service and sacrifice while performing a simple act of kindness for some young New Mexicans a long way from home.”
This kind of political behavior, public shows of service and care for the soldiers stationed overseas is an especially important aspect of the campaigns and public relations strategies for those members of the US Congress who not only sell and ship cookies to the troops, but who were instrumental in selling the war and shipping the troops overseas to Iraq. Examples of other elected Representatives attending similar events are too numerous to list.
Within the sanitary de-politicized space of the mall a political message both stands out at once, and yet it also performs a reversal by appearing as anything but politics. It is community, family values, a good time, a wholesome event, anything but politics, after all, if it were politics it certainly wouldn’t be allowed in the mall?
A Bicycle Ride
During the time I lived in Albuquerque I became quite fond of riding around the city on my bike. It was during these rides that I took in the landscape of Albuquerque, from the Atomic Museum and the missile in Old Town, to the bizarre scenes of rampant jingoism in the malls and other places in the city’s Northeastern suburbs. I spent an awful lot of time cruising along the old Route 66 and down into the central and western edges of the city where some of its poorest inhabitants live. I can recall few places as depressing and hopeless as those apartments set on the sun baked grounds just outside of Kirtland Air Force Base, or the back alleys off of Central Avenue where the signs of homelessness, alcoholism, and social decay were as obvious as the bottles, filthy blankets, and overflowing dumpsters that crowded the sidewalks and driveways.
One thing that anyone who traverses Albuquerque cannot help but to notice is the great proliferation of loan stores, pawn shops, discount grocers, liquor stores, and thrift shops. In such concentrations, and with some, especially the avaricious loan stores doing so well, the signs of poverty and desperation are as clear as day. New Mexico remains the poorest state in the nation with almost 20% of its population living below the poverty line. To anyone familiar with the state’s social order and some of its militarist cultural values, the heavy and persistent rain of statistics from dozens of studies showing New Mexico to be the poorest, least educated, and unhealthiest state in the nation comes as no surprise.
With the nuclear militarism and poverty come some of the stranger landscapes and monuments in Albuquerque. Some of the strangest include the Albuquerque Isotopes Baseball Park. The Isotopes, or "Topes" as they are affectionately called by locals, are Albuquerque’s minor league baseball team. The name's irony is surely not lost on anyone, but the doubly ironic origin of the name surprises many. Christening Albuquerque's baseball team the "Isotopes" would have been at first thought a no-brainer. The city's biggest claim to fame is its massive nuclear military-industry, complemented by the city's grab bag of landmarks and icons fit for the cold war age of atomic weaponry including the nuclear family's bright radiation powered future.
But the apparent was not enough to lead to the team's name. In fact, as any native will tell you, the Albuquerque Isotopes really got their name from the fictitious "Springfield Isotopes" baseball team on that powerhouse of American pop culture (and critique) The Simpsons. The atomic culture of militarism that is so pure and powerful in Albuquerque is the perfect setting for the Topes. But in an important demonstration of the national and global meanings of nuclear weapons and the atomic age, the team’s name wasn’t cemented from within the bubble of central New Mexico’s militarized culture. It came from without, from a work of national pop-culture, and in doing so, the name shows us the interplay between what is created within and what becomes of the world without. Albuquerque’s atomic culture is definitely an oddity in America, but only in its purity, not its quality.
Across the street from the Isotopes Stadium is the headquarters of Lockheed Martin, New Mexico. Both caveats, the stadium and Lockheed shine under the high desert sun as the perfectly ubiquitous reminders of atomic industry and culture, one always reinforcing the other. By day mommy or daddy might work at Lockheed, or perhaps Sandia Labs, and in the evenings the whole family can go out to the ballgame, out to Isotopes Park.
Another strange landmark in Albuquerque is the “Death Yucca.” When driving into the city from the East on the I-40 one can hardly miss it. The Death Yucca appears off the right side of the freeway, suddenly, with its leaves made of scrapped F-15 fighter jet fuel tanks pointing sharply and dramatically upward and out. It looks like a yucca plant except for its enormous size and bright silvery shine. At night the Death Yucca is illuminated by bright purple iridescent lights. It has been defended as an artistic statement for disarmament and it has been derided as just another offering to the city’s nuclear gods. Like the missile and other artifacts of Albuquerque’s voracious nuclear culture, the Death Yucca is just another perfect landmark to communicate the values and mission for which the whole state has been mobilized for decades now.
One of the more confusing monuments to militarism in Albuquerque is the three massive torpedoes mounted at the entrance to Bullhead Memorial Park near Kirtland Air Force Base. The torpedoes which thrust outward like the prongs of a trident have been set in place to memorialize the USS Bullhead, a World War Two submarine on which many locals served. Monuments like these, torpedoes mounted in the desert, cannons assembled in the Old Town Square, a seventy-foot tall rocket, and Death Yuccas abound in Albuquerque, a person only needs to spend some time searching the city’s streets for them. It’s part and parcel of the atomic agora.
But Albuquerque is so much more than apocalyptic totems and displays of militarism. On many a bike ride through the city I have experience vibrancy and life. Even in the pockets of deepest poverty, or underneath the tallest artistic pedestals upholding symbols of the means to a post human planet, one can find hope in this quintessentially American town. The city truly is an atomic agora, but just as the history of nuclear weapons has its antithesis in the global movement to abolish them, so Albuquerque’s nuclear culture and militarized landscape has its resistors and signs of struggle. Here and there, carved in the pavement; a peace sign, strung from the flagpole a rainbow banner; “PACE,” or the blue planet flag, dissent on the radio waves or in the press; “stop the war!”; an anti-war, anti-violence mural painted on the side of a video store or a wall in the barrio. Inspiration springs to life every summer when the floral symbol of the anti-nuclear movement, the sunflower, blooms across Albuquerque in stunning arrays and colors. I have never seen a city so fond of the sunflower! Nuclear militarism dominates New Mexico, but does not and cannot squash the flowerings of peace, justice, and sustainability that continue to grow, like weeds sprouting from the cracks in the pavement. Life continues in Albuquerque New Mexico.
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